


Children of the Vault

by Winterling42



Series: Flesh and Blood and Dust [18]
Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman, Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Backstory, Child Abuse, Childbirth, Forced Pregnancy, Gen, Graphic Description, Infanticide, Physical Abuse, Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-01
Updated: 2016-04-01
Packaged: 2018-05-30 15:12:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,060
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6429508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Winterling42/pseuds/Winterling42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Did you think the Wasteland would be kind to those who cannot defend themselves? Did you think that the Citadel would be kind? What the Immortan does to the children he won't keep.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Children of the Vault

**Author's Note:**

> This is NOT a good place you guys. heed tags.

There are many children in the Vault. Not living ones, no, not even after Joe was thrown from his high horse into the dust and torn to pieces. After that, they took down the door and made it into a healing place, a place for recovery and growth. But not a place for children.

Not living ones, anyway.

Most of his children were born in the Vault. Joe could not have been afraid of them running, the Wives, not when their bodies were shaking with labor and their thighs were wet with blood and womb-water. So perhaps it was a precaution on the baby’s part, to avoid risking infection in the dust and muck of the Citadel. And maybe it was simple convenience, for while he kept a close watch on the mothers of his seed, babies rarely come when or where expected. So most were born in the Vault.

The Vault is a peculiar place, in birthing time. No man belongs there; some greater pain reigns, and even Joe must bow to it. He seldom stays, but is brought by an Imperator at the moment of the birth itself, thus bypassing all the pain and screams and blood that he cannot rule.

The first time Angharad got pregnant, it made a fourth person in the Vault. Counting Cheedo, and Capable, and the Dag, and herself. Toast had not yet arrived, was still running fast on hot sands somewhere far away. Somewhere younger, and cleaner than the Vault.

Her first pregnancy Angharad bore alone. Joe did not touch her, in that balancing time, careful of the life she had not asked to bear. It was the only time the Wives counted in weeks, the stages of development drummed through their skin in bits and pieces. When one of them was pregnant, the Organic was an almost constant presence in the Vault, digging and prying and pressing with his greasy fingers. They all hated him, and for him they saved the worst of their glares, their hisses and their malice. All the hatred they dared not turn on Joe, they saved for his ‘doctor’ right hand.

During those long, long weeks (into months, but months were impossible things in the Citadel. What did such a collection of days matter, when you were already given too few?) Angharad had her sharp glass in hand more than ever. But she did not dare cut herself with Joe so close, the Organic practically only a breath away. There was no release for her in blood, as there had been.

She grew heavy, and wide, but only at her center. Against that shining, stretched skin, her fingers seemed skeletal. Like whatever was inside her was sucking all the life away, into itself. The Dag pretended nothing had changed, except to spit on the ground where Organic walked. Pheona curled herself into a corner whenever he was present. Capable and Caelai were chained with worry, bound up between their love of Angharad and their guilty, desperate thanks that it was not them with a heavy belly. Not now, anyway. Not for the night.

They curled around Angharad anyway, the hare nibbling at the roots of yellow hair, Capable’s arms around her chest. Angharad was comforted by the protective splay of long, pale fingers over the stomach that didn’t, quite, belong to her anymore. Even when the child started kicking the breath from her lungs, a sign that made the Organic crow and Joe preen about the Vault for days, admiring his unborn son, Capable was hovering, anxious for Angharad and not the thing she carried.

It meant something.

Thirty weeks after the Organic’s first spit-stained announcement, Splendid went into labor, and Joe vanished from the Vault. Cheedo was in her room – whether she was hiding or forbidden to come out, Angharad was never certain. Capable would not leave her side, though Organic kept snapping at her and ordering her back and forth across the room. She went, though under any other circumstances she would have spat on his face when he told her to move. The Dag had vanished into their bedroom, crouched on the floor between two of the old twin beds, her hands over her ears to stifle the sounds. Pheona crouched at her feet, silent and shuddering. It sounded too much like fire, and mud, and dead dead dead everyone dead. The only thing missing was a War Boy to howl and snatch them up off the ground.

Angharad was screaming, and then silent, and then Adara was licking her face as she breathed. The lioness was panting, even in the artificial cool of the Vault, and her muscles shivered and groaned with Angharad’s as they fought. She fought herself, she fought the thing inside her, she fought whatever face life took when life meant blood and pain. Though it had been over a thousand days since Angharad had lifted her fists in a fight, she remembered what it took. More than strength (she’d never had much) or even smarts, to win a fight she only had to _want_ it more. She may not want this thing that was pushing itself free of her, but more than she wanted to live another day she wanted it _gone_.

So the day went, and the night. Capable hovered, did not dare to hold her hand. Did not look at the Organic Mechanic, who mostly took up one of the most comfortable chairs in the Vault and picked his nose, occasionally wandering over to see what was happening between her legs. Telling Angharad when to walk or sit in the pool. Adara paced, stiff-legged, back and forth across a section of the Vault barely the length of her body. There was blood in the water of the pool, the smell of womb water thick on the air. Angharad was too tired to scream now, but her lips were dripping red from her teeth, until she suddenly collapsed around herself, splashes of water across the dusty floor from where she’d been crouched in the pool. Adara rushed forward, unsteady on her huge feet, and she was there first to touch her nose to the trembling child in Angharad’s arms.

Organic was a step behind, of course, to pull the gooey mess from her arms, cut the cord between them with a careless jerk of his hand, hands rough and dirty on skin so new it had never seen the light of day. Now she screamed, the child, because he held her up to the light and she was small, red.

Perfect.

A girl.

The Organic Mechanic turned her over in his hands, careless of her wailing, as if he’d find a penis if he just looked hard enough. It wasn’t until Angharad stumbled to her feet, shaking and and unsteady as a newborn herself, that he clicked his tongue against his teeth and handed her back. Capable hesitated just outside of their radius, rags and a torn blanket held in her hands. Adara backed up a step, her fur almost black with water where she’d lunged into the pool.

“Might as well not waste the cloth,” Organic said, to Capable. “He’ll be by in a few minutes, at most. No point in wasting milk either.”

“Get out,” Adara and Caelai hissed in unison, their voices mingled eerily in the echoes of the Vault. Angharad turned away, towards Capable, her daughter’s head cradled in the palm of her hand, her eyes wide. When the Mechanic didn’t move, shaking his head, the lioness shouted it, and the hare was with her. “GET OUT!” they screamed, and for a moment it almost felt like power. For a moment, Angharad stepped up out of the pool and put her child in Capable’s hands so they could clean her, and it felt like the world had shifted on its axis.

“My job’s done here,” Organic said, picking up a corner of his filthy apron to wipe his hands on. “I ain’t sticking around to watch the fallout.” As if that made his retreat less of a surrender.

It didn’t matter. None of them were paying attention. There was a time, endless and only a few minutes long, when they simply reveled in the golden, frozen wonder that kicked and screamed and breathed and _lived_.

She had a few colorless strands of hair on her head, eyes bluer than the sky, and fingers so small Angharad couldn’t believe they worked. Capable said nothing, only cleaned her off with all the care she could muster, murmuring wordless comforts to quiet her toothless screams. Angharad didn’t think Capable was aware of the sounds she was making, but the child burbled back, a language no one was meant to understand. Words weren’t enough to convey the sudden, depthless devotion Angharad felt for this tiny thing blinking back at her, nose curled up a little. Her daemon coalescing somewhere nearby, nothing but a prickling energy against the skin.

The door to the Vault was open, had been since Angharad went into labor, so that the Imperator on guard outside could fetch Joe the moment the birth had happened. Now, they did not even have the clicking warning of the door before the Immortan was there, filling the room with white fury and a growl that sputtered in the back of his throat like a flooded engine.

“What’s this?” he said, at the end of the tunnel, but before Angharad could do more than turn around he had crossed the Vault and was between them, hauling the child up with one hand, ignoring the way Adara’s cry echoed the baby’s scream. “A _female_.” Joe had to see it for himself, but he did not seem as anxious as the Organic had to make sure of his result. Ilaria followed more lazily, sniffing at the air, and when the hyena met Adara’s stare Ilaria licked her chops, something hideous shining in her eyes.

When Angharad reached desperately for the fragile little thing in his grip, Joe turned his simmering anger on her. He wrapped chalky hands around her throat, choking off her furious cries.

“You’ll bear me Warlords, Splendid,” he growled, even as the baby’s screams grew weaker in his hand. Capable bent forward, but didn’t quite dare to take her from him. Instead she bowed her head, hands outstretched, her breath caught in her chest. “You’ll bear me sons as flawless as this. As flawless as you.”

Angharad bared her teeth, her hands wrapped around his wrist, all her depthless, indescribable joy turned to a sudden rage as dark and violent as he was. If he saw it in her eyes, he did not care. Joe laughed, tightening his hand around her throat until her snarl turned to gasps, until the rage in her eyes fled into fear, fingers scrabbling at his grip. He held her there until her knees sagged, her hands went limp. And then he let her fall, blood still slicking her thighs, and Capable didn’t dare move, and Ilaria took the silent child from Joe’s hand as delicately as a moth coming in to perch. No one in the Vault had the stomach to watch her teeth sink deep as blood. None of them could stop hearing the thin crunching sound as their tormentors walked out of the Vault, Joe with anger still in his step.

Capable was still frozen, while beside Adara Caelai letting out a barely audible keen behind her teeth. Angharad had fallen to her knees, scraped raw on the stone of the Vault, but that was the least of her hurts. Whether she was sobbing or coughing not even Adara could tell. Briefly, she threw up on the stone, but her muscles were too abused and wrung out to do more than clench weakly, push up a little bile.

“Never again,” she said, her voice so hoarse it was like listening to the wind through stone. “Not that. Not ever.”

 

This was the Vault. By the time Furiosa returned, Angharad had born another daughter. Capable had carried two children more than half-way before losing them. The Dag had born a son who breathed for ten days before suffocating under the weight of his own chest. Toast had been pronounced pregnant twice, but had lost both of them less than two weeks afterward.

The Vault is not a place for children.


End file.
